i don't use the remote drive so much as the other pieces like logistics to the vehicle.
i enjoy running through forests without slowing down much in my tank.
my request is an option or toggle to turn off the bounce back so i can roll through trees like any other tank.

i enjoy running through forests without slowing down much in my tank.

Just try driving your tank backwards! The bounce effect will still be there, but it's not as obnoxious as when you're driving forwards. :-)

my request is an option or toggle to turn off the bounce back so i can roll through trees like any other tank.

No option, no toggling! For now it must suffice that no vehicle bounces off trees anymore. Please try 0.1.18! (Should work, but I'd appreciate feedback.)

I hope you don't mind me necroing this post, but I have to agree. bounce is VERY annoying for the player car. would it be possible to remove bounce on the player car?

I understand it helps with the pathfinding of remote controlled cars, but makes cars/tanks useless for anything but transport. Ramming a single biter in a tank is basicly a death sentence, since you come to a full stop after the collision. Once the biters start swarming you, it's hard to recover from the situation because of bounce. It also makes ramming spawners to kill them a less viable tactic

Are trees still a problem? If not, I could make it so that vehicles would behave similar when they collide with spawners or biters.
(There's one difference: trees have less health.)

trees are... kinda weird atm. you're not boncing on them, but you get health back. soo... i can heal my tank by running throgh a forest

disabling bounce for biters and spawners would definetly improve the situation.

Oh, forgot about the health regeneration. That's not what I meant.

Try to send your car through a forest! A vehicle's behavior on colliding with trees depends on its weight. If the impact is strong enough to destroy the tree, there is no bouncing.

Trees giving back health is intentional, by the way. Even a tank doesn't last too long if attacked by several spitters or worms at once. In early mid game, without bots and without power armor, it's really useful if you can repair a tank without leaving it. Also this behavior should let you rethink your tactics: It's not wise to kill all trees because you may need them during combat. Also, fighting enemy bases in the desert is more dangerous now because trees are rare. (Think of health regeneration by hitting trees as compensation for more problems while driving.)

There's something off with the bounce back logic. I don't have empirical data, but it appears to happen more frequently when my vehicle's shields fall. The scenario is that I'm killing Rampant biters and nests. I'm circling around the the nests and letting the Autodrive autofire and my personal lasers mow down everything. The turrets and spitters put a damage-over-time sticker on the tank. Once my shields are gone, there's a good chance that I'll "bounce" and get stuck. The only way to get unstuck is by turning / backing up. This will happen multiple times during the strafe fight, in various areas around the nests, and at various facings with varying armor levels. It's a death trap when it happens at the wrong time!

I've got a new idea:
1) If a vehicle kills a tree at first impact, it won't bounce, but will proceed and get it's full health restored. This is the current behavior.
2) NEW: If a vehicle hits a biter/spitter, a spawner, or an enemy turret (worms are turrets in disguise), it won't bounce, but accelerate for a while. This could still turn into a deathtrap if there is a rock, a cliff, or water close behind the hit target.
3) If another entity has been hit, it will be healed if it belongs to the same force as the vehicle; if it belongs to another force, only the vehicle will be healed. This also is the current behavior.

Let's see how this will work! Turning bouncing off completely doesn't seem to be practical, because changing position helps with finding a new path.

3:
I am not too sure about the healing of vehicles when they collide with something friendly. I see how it could help if there are multiple automatic vehicles running about on the map, or there are no "roads" put into place for vehicles to follow. They would eventually die if they accumulated more and more damage to collisions. So healing them when two friendly vehicles collide could be a nice way to prevent that. But there are already vanilla mechanics to prevent attrition from collision. Namely repair packs. This can also be automated with construction bots. Also: I am not aware of any method in this mod to automate the vehicles. Collisions will therefor not occur on a regular basis, also, since you need to order them around manually, you will see any damage to them and react accordingly.

Still, leaving healing for colliding vehicles in wouldn't be much of a problem, it doesn't affect gameplay too much.

2:

I do not understand the reasoning behind this? Why add another feature that adds weird behavior to vehicles? Making the vehicle accelerate after a collision with a biter will not add anything meaningful to the game, it will just be annoying. Simply removing any additional interaction after a collision with a biter would be far better.

I do understand that bouncing can help with path finding. It helps to clear any potential deadlocks a vehicles could get into after a collision since it forces the car to re-path. Sadly, it's not a cure for every situation. I quite often had a vehicle collide over and over again with a wall that had a right angle. The car would bounce on the outermost edge of the wall, move back a few meters, calculate a new path and collide with the wall again. It wouldn't even try to find a new path without bounce, so it is a much needed feature for automatic cars. But there will still be manual oversight needed fort your vehicles. Accelerating on the other hand? Why? I fail to see any use for that.

1:

Healing when hitting a tree is a deal breaker for me. It removes much of the hassle when dealing with biters early on. there's no reason to ever stop. just keep on trucking, if you get low on health, just hit a random tree. I also don't see any reason why this is in the mod. I never saw an automated vehicle run into a tree. The pathfinding avoids those. It only affects the player. This only gets worse after the proposed changes. Currently, you can get stuck on biters due to bounce. So you might not be able to reach a tree in time. if you accelerate after hitting a biter/spawner/worm, you will have an easier time getting out again and hit that sweet tree.

I therefor recommend the following changes:
1): remove healing from collisions. This would mean players would have to create proper roads a vehicle can follow to prevent damage within their own factory. This would change the way a factory needs to be planned out. Which is added gameplay, which is nice. It's also not too punishing. creating straights a car could take inside a factory without any buildings in the way isn't too hard to do.
2): no additional interaction on hitting biters or an enemy faction. No healing, no bounce, no acceleration. Just plain vanilla.

1:

Healing when hitting a tree is a deal breaker for me. It removes much of the hassle when dealing with biters early on. there's no reason to ever stop. just keep on trucking, if you get low on health, just hit a random tree.

Obviously, this depends on the biome the vehicle is moving in. If it's an area with many trees, sure, finding one to get healed isn't much of an issue. In a desert, however, trees are a rare commodity, so some planning is needed (should I hit that tree now, when I still have 75% health, or should I save it for a real emergency later on?). Even in a forested area, there will be tactical decisions to make: I found leaving a trail of poison capsules in my wake and luring hoardes of biters/spitters through the poison clouds very effective. But the poison clouds will also destroy trees, so you'll have to consider if you can afford to use poison capsules and deprive yourself of trees for healing.

I also don't see any reason why this is in the mod. I never saw an automated vehicle run into a tree. The pathfinding avoids those. It only affects the player.

Usually, that's true. But if the target destination is surrounded by trees, even automated vehicles will path through them (using the path with the least trees in the way).

2:

I do not understand the reasoning behind this? Why add another feature that adds weird behavior to vehicles? Making the vehicle accelerate after a collision with a biter will not add anything meaningful to the game, it will just be annoying. Simply removing any additional interaction after a collision with a biter would be far better.

Currently, vehicles will bounce whenever they hit something. It has been established that bouncing is a deathtrap if it happens after colliding with an enemy unit. This is the reason why you requested an option to turn bouncing off.

I played around with letting the vehicle not bounce if it hit biters/spitters. That didn't help much: If there was a bunch of enemies in the direction the vehicle was driving, they still would stop it. So, there must be a way to increase the vehicle's impact on the enemies.

Force is the product of mass and velocity, so increasing the vehicle speed by accelerating for a while should result in more damage dealt to the enemies blocking the way, thus killing them more quickly and allowing the vehicle to get away.

Also, it makes no sense that vehicles should back off when colliding with a spawner instead of trying to flatten it. That's why I applied this behavior also to spawners. Enemy turrets are an edge case: worms are based on the turret prototype, but if there are several players playing on different forces against each other, enemy players' turrets would also be affected.

3:
I am not too sure about the healing of vehicles when they collide with something friendly. I see how it could help if there are multiple automatic vehicles running about on the map, or there are no "roads" put into place for vehicles to follow. They would eventually die if they accumulated more and more damage to collisions. So healing them when two friendly vehicles collide could be a nice way to prevent that. But there are already vanilla mechanics to prevent attrition from collision. Namely repair packs. This can also be automated with construction bots.

I think you misunderstand! I've found this comment by dorfl in the code:

-- While autodriving, we don't damage our own stuff

So, the vehicle will be healed if it collides with an inserter etc. But the inserter etc. will also be healed so that you don't wreck your entire factory with your tank. (Need to check: Does that really work or will killed entities really be destroyed?)

Also: I am not aware of any method in this mod to automate the vehicles.

From the information page:

Circuit network sensor: Car will interact with the circuit network via a Shortwave channel. Use the radio control to select a car and a radio to associate the two. Send X and Y signals to the shortwave channel to direct the car.

Towards the end of this thread, I've discussed programming vehicles with dorfl. I've only made a prototype for sending a vehicle on an automated path. Never got around to use that for real, though …

I therefor recommend the following changes:
1): remove healing from collisions. This would mean players would have to create proper roads a vehicle can follow to prevent damage within their own factory. This would change the way a factory needs to be planned out. Which is added gameplay, which is nice. It's also not too punishing. creating straights a car could take inside a factory without any buildings in the way isn't too hard to do.

If only it was that easy! The pathfinding is not implemented optimally. I've laid out straight roads, but very often, a vehicle would decide to drive some tiles away from it, even on ground giving a speed penalty. I haven't looked enough at the pathfinding code yet, it still seems like dark magic to me. But as long as I can't guarantee that the roads will be used, I think it's better to keep the healing in.

2): no additional interaction on hitting biters or an enemy faction. No healing, no bounce, no acceleration. Just plain vanilla.

Not a good idea because hitting enemy units etc. would still be a deathtrap (see above).

I'll probably leave the accelerating in for now, shouldn't delay the next release much longer. Just try it and see if it brings any new problems! Even if you don't like the idea in connection with enemies, consider it as testing for the panic mode (e.g. with the train sensor)! :-)

I somehow completely forgot about the whole shortwave integration part. It might still work without the repairing part though. Depending on how long it takes to get to construction bots. And how much damage a vehicle actually does. It also might not work. Sadly I don't have the time to test it, or I would try to get a proper opinion on it.

I still can't agree on repairing while hitting trees and the acceleration on hitting biters. Both are HUGE changes to the vanilla mechanics, while not strictly necessary for the mod.

If you decide to force your automated vehicle through a forest then you have to be aware it's going to take damage from running over trees.

I can't really say how the acceleration thing would affect automated vehicles. But It would be highly annoying for manual driving.

If you're adamant on keeping those changes, consider tying it to automated vehicles - it would keep the vanilla mechanics for offensive vehicle warfare against biters intact

I somehow completely forgot about the whole shortwave integration part. It might still work without the repairing part though. Depending on how long it takes to get to construction bots. And how much damage a vehicle actually does. It also might not work. Sadly I don't have the time to test it, or I would try to get a proper opinion on it.

My own game proceeds quite slowly -- how does 300+ hrs in and no bots yet sound to you? So I appreciate very much not to have to get out in order to repair my ride.

I still can't agree on repairing while hitting trees and the acceleration on hitting biters. Both are HUGE changes to the vanilla mechanics, while not strictly necessary for the mod.

I, on the other hand, quite like the repairing-by-hitting-trees. I'm not sure about the acceleration thing yet, but I have the feeling that it actually may be necessary for the mod (the pathfinding issue). I don't know if it will work as expected, that needs to be tested in a real game (which I unfortunately haven't had the time to play for ... well, it must be months now). I hope you still may give it a try (actually, the accelerating is just a short-time thing, 15 ticks or a quarter second right now).

I certainly won't remove the tree-healing! But adding a setting to disable it is easy enough, so I'll give you that. I'll even give you a second setting so you can opt out of "healing friendly entities on collision". These will be global settings because that's the easiest way to implement the features as I won't have to worry about storing additional data per player (which otherwise would be required to prevent desyncs).